ENWorld’s Hot Roleplaying Games – July 2014

For a while here I was keeping track of ENWorld’s chart of the “hottest RPGs” – hotness, in this case, being based on what’s being actively discussed on as wide a pool of internet fora and blogs as they can find RSS feeds for. I haven’t kept up the monthly updates for a while, because… well, just check out what’s going on down there.

Remember: this isn’t tracking sales, and it isn’t even tracking popularity (because conceivably a game could get onto the chart if there were a sufficiently virulent negative reaction to it). Note that I’m presenting here the scores assigned to each game, not the percentages.

Note that according to the chart page a 0 score doesn’t mean nobody’s mentioned a particular game – a statistically significant sample has shown up but no more than that. For sanity’s sake I’m only tracking zero-scores which previously scored. Games which did not chart presumably either failed to even yield a statistically significant sample or have had their categories retired from the chart (as appears to be the case with the redundant Dnd/Pathfinder category).

At the moment, let’s face it, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is the big story. It’s got a higher score than every other game in the chart combined, which means that over half of all the conversations tracked by ENWorld’s algorithms involve D&D 5E in some respect. The gulf between it and every other game may even be greater than it looks here; ENWorld don’t publicise how the underpinnings of this chart works precisely, presumably to stop people spoofing them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of the score for Pathfinder, D&D 4E, D&D 3E and other D&D-alikes like the OSR games and 13th Age actually arise from discussions where people are directly comparing 5E to those games.

Either way, because of the way the scores work, every other game that isn’t 5E or directly peripheral to the 5E conversation has had its score crash. That doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about those games – it just means that people are talking a lot about 5E. It shot to the top of the chart soon after the product line was released, its score has only increased since, and I suspect that the staggered release of the three core rulebooks will keep the conversation going strong until at least the end of the year. Either way, I’m not going to give a comparison of where each individual game has moved since the last chart because I suspect the scores aren’t very comparable; what is clear is that thanks to the elephant in the room regenerating Doctor Who style, the state of the dialogue within the RPG community is in flux, and it’ll be a while until things die down back to normal. The big question is what “normal” will look like with the new D&D exerting itself.